Mateja Starič, author
Klemen Hvala, cello
Prof. Dr. Valentin Riedl, scientist
Rozalija Curk, grandmother

Mementophonia  is a musical documentary performance that places the importance of human memory at the heart of its treatment. It explores how it shapes our consciousness, our identity and our sense of wholeness, and what all this means given the fact that our memory is so relentlessly fragile and deceptive. Music occupies a special place in this, as the memory of it is often preserved in our brains longer than any other.
The author Mateja Starič, in collaboration with renowned instrumentalist Klemen Hvala, builds an audio-visual collage with vocals and cello. The live music is interwoven with audio and video recordings of two different narratives – a conversation with Mateja’s 96-year-old grandmother Rozi and an interview with the renowned German neurologist Prof. Dr. Valentin Riedl. The latter offers us some scientific insights into the functioning of the human brain, while both the bright and dark sides of Rozi’s past unfold before us. The central motif of her memories is a song from her youth, which she spent in a Nazi concentration camp in Germany during the war. However, these dark experiences do not dominate her thoughts – her memory returns to the song again and again.
Through the continuous manipulation of recordings, fragments of the story are methodically assembled and given meaning from indistinct fragments. Similarly, a complete musical composition is gradually created from individual syllables, tones and noises. The performance thus symbolically imitates the process of building memory with its procedures and at the same time evokes a premonition of its disintegration.
Almost a century of subjective life stories and objective scientific truth confront each other. They are connected by the inexplicable beauty of what, at the end of life, seems to be the last song of memory – music.